TORONTO Public health officials continue to investigate whether a COVID-19 outbreak at a Bradford West Gwillimbury long-term care home is connected to a variant of the virus detected in the United Kingdom. The Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit confirmed on Sunday that an individual who tested positive for the U.K. variant had close contact with someone connected to the outbreak at Bradford Valley Care Community. According to the health unit, six of 230 residents and three of 260 staff members have tested positive for the virus. “It is worrisome,” said Sandy Kerr, who’s 84-year-old mother Barbara Dawson is one of the six residents who tested positive for COVID-19.
TORONTO One year ago today, health officials in Ontario confirmed Canadaâs first presumptive case of COVID-19, though at the time the novel coronavirus hadnât yet been named. The risk to Canadians was still considered âlow.â Talk of âphysical distancingâ or widespread masking hadnât entered the conversation. Experts believed that the virus wasnât easily transmitted between people. Much has changed. The country has logged more than 19,000 deaths related to COVID-19 and more than 750,000 confirmed cases. Plus, more than ever before, doctors became mainstays of news broadcasts over the last year. âIt feels like a decade, to be fair,â said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto General Hospital.
OTTAWA With 2020 a year like no other now in the rearview mirror, CTV’s Question Period convened a series of guests to dive into the political year ahead and offer their forecasts for 2021. From high-profile partisans to a former leader and those with their finger on the pulse of the ongoing health and economic crises, here’s CTV Question Period’s panelists’ assessments of the challenges ahead, and advice to the parties and their leaders. The vaccine rollout “I think there s many challenges. I think the first challenge that is pretty obvious is the logistical challenge. The front-runner vaccines right now are still dual dose vaccines, so we re going to require people to be vaccinated at 21 or 28 day intervals. Being able to manage that and having some sort of a tracking system or a registry of some sort I think is a big task when we re looking at potentially millions of Canadians who are going to be getting this vaccine. The other is in clearing up all of th